Resistance always has meaning

It's been a strange, blocked sort of week, with sad edgings of loss.

Among other things, one of the Resident Fan Boy's aunts-by-marriage is slipping away.  We received emails and texts over the weekend from her daughter, asking us to send her a "funny card".  Aunt-by-Marriage used to send us sort of care packages at Christmas, filled with bolts of fabric, ties her husband didn't want, and clipped New Yorker cartoons, so I dropped by the local bookstore and picked out two New Yorker cartoon greeting cards and let the RFB choose. He filled it with an innocuous note of recent family doings, not wishing to scribble "Hello, auntie, we hear you're at death's door…."

Remembering how long it's likely to take a card to reach San Diego, I took it to the post office yesterday to see how quickly they could send it and for how much.  The young man shook his head sympathetically.  For fifty bucks, it could be there in a day; for twenty-five, three days.  I opted for the latter, because despite the gravity of the situation, I couldn't countenance fifty dollars to send a greeting card. It isn't that funny.

It was only when I got home that I remembered that the Resident Fan Boy's dearly departed uncle would have had his birthday today and Aunt-by-Marriage could very well time her departure to coincide with this (it wouldn't be the first time, for either side of the family), so maybe I should have splurged.

The reason I remembered DDU's birthday is because we have a pile-up of birthdays on February 4th: one of my nephews, a distant cousin, and Demeter.  For the past week, I've been trying to knuckle down and write a letter of acceptable length to enclose in her card.  I know she would prefer that above any other gift.  Somehow, I'm blocked.

There's a book on writing I've always loved entitled Writing on Both Sides of the Brain by Henriette Klauser. One of her banners is "Resistance Always Has Meaning".  As I sat in the study this evening, chatting with Demeter by Skype (which may be why I lack subject matter for letters right there), and listening to younger daughter moan and groan her way through a homework assignment while the Accent Snob cowered behind my knees, I found myself wondering rather bleakly:  "Meaning for whom?"

Poor Demeter.  February is not the greatest month for a birthday.  I wish I could have been in Victoria, taking her out to dinner, giving her a card, not having to write a letter….

Meanwhile, midnight is approaching and there's no word from San Diego.  Maybe Aunt-by-Marriage will stay long enough to get her card.  And decide that it definitely wasn't worth it.

Double-duty book review (for Doctor Who fans only)

Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T Davies

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Okay, I'll be straight with you. If you're not a follower of the sci-fi/fantasy television series Doctor Who, there's probably little reason for you to read this book (or this review, for that matter). It's not just about Doctor Who, of course. It's about British television in the early part of the first decade of this century, and, above all, it's about writing, but to get to that, you 'll be wading up to your waist in Doctor Who and if you're not a Whovian, you'll just get lost, trust me.

Russell T Davies is the guy who resurrected Doctor Who. Or ruined it, depending on whom you ask. I'm married to the Resident Fan Boy who seems to have been moving into the latter camp ever since we were exposed to the final four specials that rounded off Davies' tenure in the New Who universe that he created. (The Resident Fan Boy is a Classic Whovian, devoted to the series as it was between 1963 and 1988, although he'll watch anything Who-related.)

Now, I wasn't crazy about those specials either. However, I can credit Davies with making me a New Whovian in the first place. Like many current female fan-girls, I came to DW after watching Tenth Doctor David Tennant in the saucy biopic Casanova, penned by Davies. My reaction at the time: "Hey...isn't David Tennant the new Doctor? Wait a minute...Russell T Davies wrote this? Didn't he write Bob and Rose? He's writing the new Doctor Who too?!?"

So I started watching the new Doctor Who, then I started staying up late to catch reruns of Davies' first Who season, with Chritopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and...

...I became a prime candidate to read A Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter which covers the period when Davies began writing his final full season of Doctor Who while beginning a long, detailed and deliberate series of e-mails with Doctor Who Magazine writer and journalist Ben Cook. This gives fans of the show a peephole into the shadowland of roads not taken in character development, plot, casting, and special effects (usually the first to go to save money).

For example, early on in the correspondence (back when it was going to be just a Doctor Who Magazine article and not a 600+ page tome), Davies describes his ideas for the Doctor's companion to follow Freema Agyeman's Martha Jones. (Again, if you're persisting in reading this and you're not a Whovian, you really should stop. Really.) He envisions an older woman in her thirties as a change to the twenty-somethings usually traveling through time and space with the quadricentenarian Doctor, a lady who has just been jilted by her fiancé. As these ideas are forming, news comes that Catherine Tate, who played one-off companion Donna Noble, will be returning for a whole season. Donna is thirty-something and has been jilted by her fiancé (who actually betrayed her before being fed to gigantic infant alien spiders), but now Davies must come up with a re-introduction, rather than an introduction.

And you've got to hand it to him, this guy is bursting with ideas. I spent the book thinking: "Ooooh...that would have been nice..." or "Gee, I'm glad we were spared that..." It's probably the tantalizing promise of what a story could be and the the fear that it will fall short that results in what seems to be a lot of procrastination on Davies' part. I'm beginning to wonder if this is an essential part of writing, remembering the late Douglas Adam's classic line about loving deadlines and the "whooshing sound they make as they fly by". I certainly felt a pang of recognition myself, every time Davies confesses using up precious writing time doing unrelated work or watching television, even though I have neither Davies' talent nor the responsibility for the success of an iconic television show.

Of course, having this responsibility means having not only talent and imagination, but a healthy ego and a thick skin. Davies has the first three in spades (and enough humorous self-deprecation to temper the ego). However, for all his protestations to the contrary, he has a surprisingly thin skin, particularly when it comes to the slings and arrows of outraged DW purists. When Helen Raynor (writer of two double-parter episodes) fails to resist the temptation of checking out Outpost Gallifrey (a vehement Doctor Who online fan forum), she is badly burned and Davies howls in her defense: Helen is in a delicate position in that she's only just started, and she's on the verge of being really very good - and now she finds herself ruined by this wall of hostility. It makes me furious.

Now, I think both he and she are being a bit silly. Raynor's episodes were certainly not amongst my favourites, but apparently they were vastly popular so somebody must have like them. Davies claims you can't resist seeing what people are saying about you online. I say you can and you must and any DW writer who is misguided enough to venture on to a Doctor Who fan forum must be bonkers, anyway. It's like a fight club in there; I avoid forums on any topic like the plague. I do, however, engage happily in post-episode analyses of Doctor Who episodes on other people's blogs. I think it's one of the pleasures of being a fan. We certainly don't expect Mr Davies, Ms Raynor nor anyone else involved in the show to drop by, take our advice or get their feelings hurt. Most smart actors don't read reviews; smart writers should probably do the same.

What did I learn from this book? I learned that Russell T Davies wrote not only his own episodes, but as the show's head writer re-wrote most of the episodes by other writers. Some evidently didn't mind and their comments on the process are included; a couple probably did. (I don't think Davies re-wrote episodes by Stephen Moffat who eventually took over the series from him.) Again, I was stunned by the quantity of ideas generated by this man; many of which were not used.

Bottom line? While anyone who is not a fan of Doctor Who would not get this book at all, it is pretty well irresistible for anyone who does love this extraordinary television show, whether they're a Russell T Davies fan or not. All Whovians owe a debt to him.



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The Joys of Madeleine L'Engle

When Madeleine L'Engle died nearly three years ago, a little something shriveled up inside me. It was just a little dream, a fantasy of some day meeting this woman whose books stood out like hand-holds on the steep and slippery rock-face of Life: starting with (but of course) A Wrinkle in Time when I was ten or so, to the various "Chronos" and "Kairos" books throughout my adolescence, to the Crosswicks Journals that I returned to time and again during young adulthood, to the more overtly religious essays, dotted here and there with her adult novels.

It probably would have been a disastrous or at least disappointing meeting. Although I responded to the seeking and agnostic nature of her religious views, there was enough in her writings to tell me that she might have found my Unitarian Universalist (and quasi-Quaker) views dismissible. Still, I've been married for several years to a committed liberal Anglican; maybe Madeleine L'Engle and I could have found much common ground. I'll never know.

I've been thinking of Madeleine L'Engle a lot this week. I thought I'd read just about everything that she had published, so I was astonished to see a book entitled The Joys of Love turn up on a search for something else entirely (which is usually how things work for me).

The Joys of Love was published last year by L'Engle's granddaughters. This is a very early novel, based on a short story she wrote in 1942 at about the age of 24. She reworked the story into a novel in the early fifties and re-set it in 1946, which was the year she met her husband the actor Hugh Franklin.

As I'd read pretty nearly everything she wrote, including such nascent novels as The Small Rain and And Both Were Young, I was braced for a rather dated and slightly awkward book. L'Engle really hit her stride as an author in the early sixties, and The Joys of Love, being such an early work, only gives a hint of the skilled story-teller that L'Engle later became. At this stage, she was a very good descriptive writer; her scene-setting is an effective time machine, taking me back to a New England summer sixty years gone. However, although her granddaughter Léna Roy said in the introduction that L'Engle's dramatic training gave her "a keen knack for dialogue", this book is a poor example. Even as a lifetime fan, I found myself groaning inwardly (and sometimes out loud) at the painfully artificial conversations these characters have.

Eventually I caught myself wondering if I'd somehow outgrown her other books to which I haven't turned in some time. This morning, having finished The Joys of Love, I seized half a dozen or so of my favourite L'Engle books, blew the dust off them and flipped through them. (Younger daughter is still on March Break, so there was no matutinal rush for the bus.)

You know what? They were as good as I remembered. I looked at The Young Unicorns, one of my favourites when I was about twelve. The gang-members that figure in the plot are a little "West Side Story", but the characters are whole and believable. I skimmed The Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time and still found relevance in the themes of "naming" and the need to slow down to put down roots and grow. Finally, in A Circle of Quiet, I browsed where I had underlined and bookmarked this non-fictional work about L'Engle's own meditations on art, faith and life. This was a book that I used to re-read whenever I was feeling lost and homesick. Today, I found this: We, as adults, often fall into perversity in other areas of discovery: i.e., some modern (and not so modern) art in all forms, where the artist is concentrating more on himself than on his painting or music or story. I would venture a guess that an artist concentrating wholly unself-consciously, wholly thrown into his work, is incapable of producing pornography. All perversion is self-gratification.

I think there's a key here to the problem with The Joys of Love, not that I'm suggesting for a moment that it was pornographic. It was, however, self-conscious, in the way something by a very young artist is. And for a blogger, this message about self-involvement and self-gratification may be very timely indeed...

I'm grateful for stumbling across The Joys of Love. It's not a fabulous novel; it's a green and naïve novel. It is however, a novel of promise, and it has led me back to the later, greater works of Madeleine L'Engle.

Feeling like an ash hole

I'm eating cold sausages and bacon rashers left over from last night's pancake feast. Ash Wednesday today, so the Resident Fan Boy will give up coffee for the next forty days and compound his sacrifice by making coffee for me after dinner. This evening, if the weather is not treacherous, he will take the dried out fronds of the palm leaves that have been stuck behind a picture frame above the computer and get smudged with the ashes at church.

In the meantime, I climb the hill to younger daughter's school, trying to take arty pictures of February devastation.As I bring younger daughter to her locker, I take the opportunity to congratulate Guardian Angel on her award.
"What award?"
"The book review award."
"I won an award?"
At this point Russian Prodigy, a rather nasty piece of work who has been known to speak to younger daughter as if she's an imbecile when people are watching and stuff snow into her boots when they're not, appears from nowhere, fixes me with an alarmed stare and declares: "She's not supposed to know! We were told not to tell her!"
I return her stare and say: "But the parents got an email about it yesterday! There was nothing in it about it being a surprise!" Indeed, the lengthy and rather poorly punctuated message had appeared on my monitor the previous morning. Why on earth would they send such a notice and try to surprised the recipients more than 24 hours later? All the same, I leave the school under a cloud, and feeling rather upset and disgruntled, am halfway home before I remember I was wanting to take pictures of the stuff I missed en route to school.

While I'm snapping, I see a regular on my street, a book under one arm and her trusty dachshund under the other. It's a mystery, of course. The book, that is.
"They end well," she shrugs apologetically. "That's why I like 'em, I guess."
"Yes," I say, being a P.D. James fan and of not much else in that genre, "Justice prevails."

I wind up in the coffee shop to scribble and sort. I'm re-examining two of my favourite books about writing, both by Henriette Anne Klauser: Writing on Both Sides of the Brain and Put Your Heart on Paper. She's since come out with two more books and all are available at my library. A guy in one of the booths making business calls is intrigued and asks if I'm a writer. "Not for money," I smile ruefully. I've just read in one of the books: "The difference between a writer and an author is Page 53."

The coffee shop seems to be tuned to an easy-listening satellite station this morning; they're playing The Carpenters and that ghastly "I Am Your Lady" song from the Eighties, which would easily make the Songs I Loathe list. Before I'm driven out, though, a James Taylor ditty that I do like comes on (I don't like all of James Taylor's stuff, but he did write some lovely songs), and it just happens to be another one of the songs Launchcast sent me when I first began listening to my station. Here's the video for it, and check out who's singing back-up! Feeling a little less ashen, I make my way into the salty morning.